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September 13, 2007

Top Ten Black Bloggers Update

Electronic Village recently published a list of the Top Ten Black Bloggers. At that point over 70 Black blogs had been reviewed. We shared the names and links to the Top Ten, along with honorable mention for the next 15 in the rankings.

We received some tremendous feedback from villagers all over the world. Folks want us to create widgets, add scoring value for Black blogs that work on critical issues such as Jena 6, add scoring value for Black blogs that are members of The AfroSpear or the Afrosphere Bloggers Association, and so forth.

We are reviewing all the input and continue to solicit your thoughts and ideas on how to advance this concept of tracking the Top Black Blogs and Top Black Bloggers. At this time there are two updates we can share with you:

Daily Updates - We will update the Top 10 on a daily basis in the left-hand navigation bar of the Electronic Village. We will provide a link to each of the top ten blogs. You will note that today's update is considerably different than the initial list published a few days ago. Time will tell if there continues to be daily movement on this list.

Many New Blogs Added to the List - We added almost 100 more Black Blogs in the past few days. We currently have 169 Black Blogs on the list. Please leave a comment if you think we may have missed any ... or if you want to know the current ranking for your favorite Black Blog.

Villagers, I'm open to any creative soul that wants to create a logo for this effort! For now, I look forward to your comments, ideas and suggestions...

4 comments:

In the words of one Oliver Willis... "Don't read my blog just because i'm Black". I can't emphasize that enough. Willis made those comments in response to a post that someone made at the DailyKos, encouraging readers to visit "Black Blogs".

I have never been too enthused about the term myself...but I have worn it anyway... often at my displeasure. "Black Blog" is a box that is much too small a space for me...so I am fighting to get out of it & stay out of it. But I have learned that once you are that box, it's hard to get out. It's like being branded.

I also don't want to take part in any beauty contest that is weighted on numbers... without taking other factors into account... like quality... effort and background of the bloggers, choice of topics, Uniqueness, going against the grain..thinking outside of the box, etc. Rating blogs based on these methods will simply put the celebrity/gossip blogs at the top. And maybe that is what Black blog surfers want to read (nonsensical celeb stories)... I don't know. But I don't necessarily write for a Black audience...in fact, I can say with certainty that I don't write exclusively for Black readers or primarily with Black readers in mind. I do notice that certain kinds of blogs tend to rise to the top in the so-called "Black blogosphere"...and i'll just leave it at that.

There are too many African American bloggers out there anyway; far too many to attempt to categorize and keep track of this way.

Therefore, I would like to opt out of the beauty pageant.

However... I do want to thank you for the recognition. I welcome that.

If you want to provide recognition for my blog on an individual basis... it would be greatly appreciated. I do appreciate the positive recognition. So thanks again.

Besides... Technorati has been unreliable of late. My account is frozen for some reason... likely due to a malfunction with Technorati. My site has not updated in over two weeks...and my score/ranking there is actually a little higher than what is shown.

Just one of the reasons why I have never been a big fan of awards, & "beauty pageants" as I like to call them. I don't write to win awards. It's like what Chuck D./Public Enemy (a group that I once listened to many years ago) thought about Grammy Awards. ... "----------"

Angry Independent - Your points are very well taken. Our effort to document the influence (based on links and such as measured by Technorati) is only a few days old. We currently don't list the types of postings that a Black Blog usually makes. Some of them appear to be pop culture, some politics, some personal, some podcasts, some video blogs and such. Anyhow, I appreciate you taking time to share your thoughts.

Creole Princess - I've only been trying to do this for a few days now. I imagine that the process will evolve over time. Currently, Technorati appears to be the industry standard for tracking 'influence' in terms of LINKS and such. I'm open to other alternatives if they can be shared. No doubt that Technorati has issues ... I've experienced them as well. However, my goal is to recognize bloggers of African descent. We don't seem to have any other mechanism to recognize them. Last week when I began we had 73 blogs. Today we are up to more than three times that amount (240). I know that I simply wasn't aware of most of them ... includig the majority of the Black blogs operating in the Top 10. So, for me this exercise has been useful.

I respect your point of view and I wish you nothing but success in your blogging efforts.